Super tired, super weather beaten, and feeling lazy, then feeling bad about not going out into the city and taking advantage of all its wonders. Then I remembered that I went to Hadrian's Villa outside of Rome in the beautiful town of Tivoli. We went on a tour through the ruins with an insight to who emperor Hadrian was. He was the adopted son of the Roman emperor, Trajen. Unlike Trajen, who was a soldier and a conquerer, Hadrian was a philosopher who studied Greek and was enamored with the language and the philosophers, according to our guide. Hadrian's villa was a very large establishment spanning over numerous structures including a library, two temples, a theater, fishing ponds, and a very large grove of olive trees. It was a very beautiful walk, and we even saw a large olive tree that was about 700 years old. It was a spectacular sight.
A very significant detail about this villa was that it was exavated in the Rennaisance period, and by excavated, I actually mean plundered for its marble and statuary. A lot of the statues were transported to different parts of the world. The Vatican Museum has some, the Lourve has some, and some even made it to Russia. Some of the marble was stripped from the villa to be used for our next destination, Desde's Villa. The villa belonged to a Cardinal who lived there during the summer on his days off from his duties in Rome. The tedious and fruitless moral debate on whether or not a church leader should have ever been allowed to have such an extravagant home in the first place aside, it was still a very beautiful place to visit. The mosaics on the wall and ceiling doubled as reliefs because there was such an intricate 3D design to the mosaics, like you could see the flowers coming out of the celing rather than just being nicely placed there.
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